You know what really frosts my cookies about the Getbackers manga?

(Aside from the appallingly gender-skewed and exploitative T&A which I page past as fast as possible and try not to see for the sake of my blood pressure, fuck you very much Ayamine. That one is a given.)

Aoki can't seem to decide whether Kazuki is the baddest badass in Badassville or the designated damsel in distress. His narrative position flips unpredictably from one to the other without anything in the way of signaling or set-up, and it gives me a case of story-whiplash.

I find it exceedingly predictable in shounen, to be sure; the polite ones are the ones you have to watch out for (eg Akabane), but the actively feminized male characters are either comic relief or, narratively speaking, women--women in a shounen manga, which means damsels in distress regardless of what minor skill they may have on their own account which allows them to mop up the small fry while reemphasizing that, in context, they are still weaker. Kazuki winds up written as both a and b, and rather randomly one or the other.

Second verse, same as the first: I actually have an easier time reading shounen manga when the female characters are absent, because the inclusion of female or even strongly feminine characters is almost invariably the signal for a rousing round of role reinforcement. *spits* Thus, again, my glee in any fic I find that ignores Aoki's inability to actually characterize across gender lines even when he set it up himself and takes on the work of reconciling Kazuki's character.

And everyone should go read it.

The author expresses clearly and concisely some of the knottiest issues of writing slash as a feminist. And, as a sample, let me quote the comment in which she actually manages to define feminism, which just knocked my socks off, because have you ever tried to do this? With any belief or philosophy you hold? It's amazingly hard.

Well, I tend to go with the "feminism is the radical notion that women are people" line most of the time. :)

But, of course, that tiny quote has a lot of implications -- for instance, it implies that a feminist is someone who acknowledges that we live in a society that systematically dehumanises women. We women tend to be valorised for doing things reduce our agency, that cast us as objects, etc, while if we do things that indicate that we're complex people who want to be in control of our own lives, we're automatically suspect. Another good quote, from Rebecca West is, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”

Beyond that, though, feminism is quite diverse and difficult to pin down -- because while there is a broad consensus on the need to differentiate ourselves from doormats, there are lots of different (and sometimes conflicting) ideas about how to do so. As I note above, a lot of the time, this is used, by both feminists and anti-feminists alike, to polarise feminism in very unhelpful ways, and I reject this completely, even as I acknowledge that there are feminists with whom I disagree strongly on some issues. To me, feminism is about taking all of those ideas, even those that I may initially dislike, and applying them critically, and seeing what I come away with -- sometimes, the ideas I dislike do not stand up against this process, and sometimes, I am forced to challenge my own assumptions about how things work (and sometimes I shift back and forth, undecided). I see this as an ongoing process with few easy answers.

I kind of wish there weren’t any. See, KHR is that unfortunately common kind of shounen in which all women are useless frills, even the strong ones.

Incidentally, there will be spoilers here.

The romantic interests don’t fight. They cook. They get dragged into the future and have to be rescued and, upon witnessing the boys’ determination to grow in strength and get everyone home and safe, they exclaim that they have to do their best too–to the kitchen! That is the actual line; they want to do their best too, so come on to the kitchen and let’s cook meals for the boys while they train to become stronger fighters and more mature people. *spits*

The women who do fight, at least on the good guys’ side, consist of a dying girl who only ever wins when she lets herself be possessed by (I’m sure you guessed it) one of the male fighters, the anti-cook whose “fighting ability”, as preserved from the initial gag-manga story, is a joke, and a young woman who was “saved” from the curse involved in being one of the strongest so that she could live a more ladylike life. Again, this is the actual line. Only, of course, she’s not entirely saved, so she’s a good fighter but winds up being comparatively weak and useless. On top of that, she’s billed as a great trainer but totally fails in training Tsuna (where Reborn, of course, succeeds with one sentence). *spits again*

This is why I wish there just weren’t any women along to the KHR action at all. When it’s something like Rurouni Kenshin, and Kaoru is excluded when things heat up, at least I can imagine her having kickass adventures of her own back home! (Okay, in between the soppy pining, but still.) KHR doesn’t let that space open. No, the women have to be there, they have to be present, so it can be palpably demonstrated that they are not as good as the men. *downright froths*

The only time women get a fair shake at competence in this series is when they are the villains, and not just normal villains but all the way over to the “disgusting sociopath” end of the spectrum.

This is a shounen mode that annoys the everliving fuck out of me. The fact that the mangaka is a woman disgusts me; it doesn’t entirely surprise me, mind, but it definitely disgusts me. This is the one thing that will probably keep some distance between me and KHR, despite how much I like the not-women character development and dynamics. I can engage with a series that leaves the women out, but I can’t fully engage when women are so explicitly positioned as inferior.

On this score, fannon is the only thing that might save the day.

I’ve been thinking about character shapes, and there’s one that seems to crop up a lot in manga that interests me: the character stronger than anyone else.

The character occurs less often in shoujo than in shounen stories. In shoujo, this character is generally tragic when he appears; his power is a burden and often one that separates him from other people.

(Yes, it’s almost always a male.)

So he gets to swan around being tragic and, if he’s lucky, gets relieved of the power before he dies of aggravated angst. Some classic examples of this type are Clow, from Cardcaptor Sakura, and Nakago, from Fushigi Yuugi.

In shounen, on the other hand, this character is generally insane. A psychopath. Around the bend on two wheels. He’s insane for a lot of the same reasons his shoujo counterpart is angsty: his power separates him from other people. This version, more specifically, has no one who is able or willing to restrain him and this generally leads him to have no restraint of any kind under any circumstances. He’s often a bully who hurts people for fun, the least thwarting of his whims resulting in the brutal beating of the unlucky soul who may have objected to having cigarette ash tapped on their head or similar. Alternatively he may be less deliberately dangerous and more systemically dangerous, kind of like nitro glycerine on a pogo stick.

What interests me, in an anthropological, look-how-messed-up-humans-can-be sort of way, is that the solution to the problem, in shounen, is for this character to be defeated. For someone, likely the hero, to prove he is not the strongest one around. If the story is really cleaving to the shounen formula, this taps into the basic shounen motivation (to evolve and become stronger), and the character falls, if not into line, at least into harmony with everyone else around him. More varied storylines may just focus on the basic aspect of social re-connection: the nail isn’t sticking up alone anymore. Some good examples are Agon, from Eyeshield21, Akutsu, from Prince of Tennis, and Raitei/Ginji, from Getbackers.

Of course, not every character who is stronger than everyone else will fall into these categories. These are simply broad forms that a noticeable number of such characters do fall into.

The thing I particularly notice, though, is the gender division. The story the girls are told is that power brings pain and the answer is to get rid of it or, failing that, die. The story the boys are told is that power brings lack of control and the answer is to understand you are not actually that different from those around you. In both cases the basic equation is that power brings with it a lack of connection, setting one aside from the social matrix. In both cases, the “stronger than anyone else” aspect is somehow removed, offering a re-integration. But I find it notable that the girl-story does this by removing the power while the boy-story does this by leaving the power right where it is and providing an equal power in another character or characters.